P O L I T I C A L M A N A G E M E N T A N D P O L I T I C A L C O M M U N I C AT I O N S

against other ads, as measured in such studies, do not provide a thorough investigation of negative advertising eects.45 Finally, while journalists, and even some researchers, have charged that political advertising on television is a blight on democracy and serves to dampen voter participation in politics, the evidence for such charges is limited. A few studies have demonstrated small decreases in voter turnout in races where voters were exposed to negative advertising.46 Other studies have found no such eects, or even positive eects on voter interest and participation as a result of exposure to negative advertising.47

Political Communication and New Technologies

New technological developments are rapidly reshaping the political communication landscape. Candidates, parties, interest groups, and voters increasingly rely on the Internet to communicate political information and to attempt to persuade others to their viewpoints. (See also Chapter 13, by Emilienne Ireland, on online campaigning.) In addition to the use of e-mail for contact and organizational purposes, political campaigns and government organizations quickly began to use the Web as an information distribution mechanism. The virtually unlimited space at an almost free cost was, and remains, an irresistible combination. Bill Clintons 1992 campaign was the rst presidential campaign to take advantage of the Web to distribute materials. Following the 1996 election year researchers at Rutgers University outlined the structural capabilities of the Web to enhancing democratic activity:
(a) inherent interactivity; (b) potential for lateral and horizontal communication; (c) point-to-point and non-hierarchical modes of communication; (d) low costs to users (once a user is set up); (e) rapidity as a communication medium; (f) lack of national or other boundaries; and (g) freedom from the intrusion and monitoring of government.48

It is now virtually unthinkable for any political candidate, political leader, political or government organization to forgo a Web presence. Campaign websites are the hub of modern campaigning, providing unlimited opportunities for communication with news media and the public and incorporating opportunities for fundraising, interactivity, and citizen feedback as well. While the Internet has not yet provided the kind of democratic public sphere that some researchers have idealized,49 it has nonetheless opened up new potential for candidate, citizen, and news media interaction in the form of blogs, Vlogs such as YouTube, and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Other forms of new technology are also developing into important political management tools, including cell phones, podcasting, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and even campaigning in virtual sites such as Second Life. Research on these new political communication channels and formats is still in its infancy, but there are many avenues for future development, and political communication researchers will undoubtedly continue to advance our understanding of the political contributions of these new technologies.

Political Communication and News Media

Political speeches/rhetoric, debates, advertising, and most aspects of new technologies are all primarily controlled communication; they are generated by a source (usually a candidate, a political leader, a political group, a government organization, or even a citizen). Political communication also encompasses the study of uncontrolled communication. Of course, the most common form of uncontrolled communication in the political system is represented by the news media.

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Political consultants and managers often make concentrated and Herculean eorts to inuence political news, most overtly through production of print and video news releases and the staging of campaign events (sometimes referred to as pseudo-events). Political communication researchers have learned a great deal about the interaction of political actors with the news media by studying the content of news media coverage of political campaigns and other political issues and events. Such research has veried the frequently observed news media practice of limiting quotations and coverage of actual messages of political gures to sound bites. In modern presidential campaigns, the average sound bite a candidate can expect to receive when speaking about a campaign issue or event is 78 seconds.50 In addition to shortening the time for candidates to speak, the news media also focus little of their coverage on real or substantive public issues, preferring instead to ll news time with discussions of campaign strategy, analyzing the campaign as a horserace.51 Breaking through the wall of journalistic narcissism that focuses more on what journalists think than on what candidates say and casting campaign news in a continuously negative light presents modern campaigns with dicult challenges.52 Political communication scholars have also built a strong case for two other aspects of news media coverage of political campaigns. The rst area is represented by the agenda-setting research tradition. Max McCombs and his colleagues have developed over many years convincing evidence that the mass media set the publics agenda of issues.53 In other words, the issues that the media choose to cover and their relative importance (agenda lists in order of importance) become the issues that the public judges to be important. The rst empirical testing of this agenda-setting relationship was conducted during the 1968 presidential campaign in North Carolina with undecided voters. Since that initial study, a voluminous research tradition has evolved, providing research to indicate that agenda-setting eects are strongest for voters who are heavy media users and who have a high need for orientation.54 The second convincing area of research on news media eects is framing research. Framing is the study of how the news media present issues or candidates to the public. Some agenda-setting researchers see framing as conceptually linked to agenda-setting and argue that framing is presentation of specic attributes related to an issue.55 Others, such as Robert Entman, argue convincingly that framing constitutes its own conceptual base and derives from the medias concentration on some aspects of an issue over others: to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text.56 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani dene framing as the central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events.57 Still other researchers stress the need to view framing as a separate concept and to consider the importance of audience frames as well as media frames.58 All of these approaches provide a way of analyzing media coverage of political events and help scholars and practitioners to understand the approaches and routines that guide journalistic decisions about how to cover political candidates, issues, and events.

Conclusion
Whether focusing on controlled media such as speeches, debates, ads, or new technologies or uncontrolled media such as news in print or on television, political communication is at the nexus of political campaigning and of the relationship between citizens and their leaders in the governing process. As technology continues to evolve and develop new ways for citizens to interact with their governments and their leaders and to monitor and hold them accountable for the success and failure of public policies, those governments and leaders must also embrace new technologies to develop eective ways to listen to citizens and to serve their needs. Political consultants and managers will play important roles in making these future interactions

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